The diversity offered by the music of Georg Friedrich Handel has never been absent from the recorded catalogues. Yet it has only been in recent times that the full glorious depth of his chamber vocal works with Italian texts has been explored; and to do it justice it needs to be performed by artists who have both the interpretative and technical resources. These are expectations which are surely being matched when musicians of the quality of Fabio Bonizzoni and La Risonanza are involved, and no more so when singers in Roberta Invernizzi and Marina De Liso are deploying their vocal talents.

The latest exploration into the Italian influences in the music of Handel comes with his chamber duets, on this new recording the ten works scored for soprano and alto voices, and written at various points in Handel’s journeying around Europe in the first half of the 18th century. Unlike with many of his operas, the composer was under minimal commercial pressure to pander to popular favour and yet, as Carlo Vitali points out in his booklet essay, the chamber duets “were not material for beginners, but rather for advanced music-making within circles of both connoisseurs and aristocratic amateurs”.

The chamber duets are small-scale works – the instrumental accompaniment here comes from cello (Caterina Dell’Agnello), archlute/theorbo (Craig Marchitelli) and harpsichord (Fabio Bonizzoni) – but are never lacking in the animation or melodic inspiration which one associates with the best of Handel’s music.

Having recorded these ten works Fabio Bonizzoni shows himself, as indicated in this new interview, to be interested in not stopping there. In total, Handel wrote over 20 chamber vocal works of this size and scope, so watch out for more to come!

Do these chamber duets reflect, in any way, Handel’s compositional evolution over the decades, or what else do they tell us about his response to writing for two singers?

I really do not detect any real evolution in the writing of the duets in Italian with Handel and, in terms of style, for me the writing is quite consistent during these decades from the 1710s through to the 1740s. Having said that, the first pieces prior to his return to Hanover (therefore, those composed not only in Italian but physically in Italy), are a bit different in terms of the harmonic language that is employed. The use of expressive suspensions is more extreme in such works, reflecting the typical Italian language culture in which Handel was swimming at that time. There is, of course a big difference in the scoring across these decades: while in Italy the combination of soprano and bass prevailed (and that with two sopranos is frequent as well), later on Handel seems to prefer the soprano and alto pairing, following the tradition of the duets of Agostino Steffani, for instance, whose pieces were very popular at the time.

Quite apart from Handel’s qualities as a musician, how do you consider the ability of this Saxon-born, English-domiciled intellect of responding to the Italian language and reflecting musical tastes, even in the 1740s?

Handel, who became familiar with the Italian idiom during his stay in Rome, continued to stay close to the language particularly through all his endeavours in the field of opera. Consequently, his use of Italian, not surprisingly, stays very refined through into the 1740s. Whilst opera would have been the principal marker for taste in Italian music at that time, these duets in Italian do reflect the popularity of the Italian language in the domestic dimension.

Handel wrote more than ten chamber duets. Have you thought of recording more?

He did, and we are!

So, given the fact that you are giving these works so much attention, what do you feel they offer the modern-day singer?

The duets – and, I would add, we are also contemplating the two Italian trios – are all extremely demanding for the singers. There isn’t the kind of evident and striking virtuosity that can be found in many of the cantatas, but for all that, these duets do not prove to be easier. The duets are provided with very long phrases for the singers, writing which is very contrapuntal – almost instrumental – in nature, with a great deal of interplay between the voices. In addition, there is the need of course to match and blend the sounds and find common expressions, so all this that makes for a real challenge when performing and recording these works.

In your concert programmes with La Risonanza you are also including works by Steffani and Johann Christoph Pepusch, both composers older than Handel, but ones whose careers intersected at different times with his. What do their pieces demonstrate about the form of the chamber duet? How do you feel that they compare to those by Handel?

Steffani is very interesting in this aspect: his duets, in a certain way acting as the archetype of the Italian duet, are definitely different from those of Handel. The formal variety of Steffani’s duets is larger, as they include recitatives and small solo arias next to the parts marked a due. The initial Italian duets composed by Handel do sometimes include very short sections acting as a kind of dramatic interplay between the longer sections, but these are not to be considered in the pure recitativo style, rather they should be seen as a form of exclamatory or declaratory style. In addition, they are always a due. Later on, he leaves behind him this form and his duets become “multi movemented” rather than “multi-sectional”.

Are you attracted by other musical sound worlds prior to Handel, which were also influenced by Italian ideas or language (one could say this of Henry Purcell, to some extent)?

Very much so. The Missa Non sine quare by Johan Kaspar Kerll, another German composer who studied in Rome, was La Risonanza’s first performed and recorded programme [and recently reissued on the Pan Classics label], and more recently I have become very attracted by the music of Purcell. To that end, in 2014, we are interpreting Dido and Aeneas and I am very excited about this. The production will include a light staging and, from the musical point of view, will also be exploring composers such as Henry Eccles and Godfrey Finger who were working at the same time as the great Purcell.